Is There a Way to Get Contact Information Off of an iPhone Backup File for PC?

Like most mobile devices that can hold considerable amounts of end-user data, the Apple iPhone can keep a consistent copy of its memory in a back-up folder on a personal computer. The user connects the iPhone to the computer regularly, so that the difference between the back-up copy and the information on the iPhone is small when something happens to the phone. However, if your iPhone goes missing or becomes unusable and you do not have access to another iPhone, the back-up copy is stored in a special format on the computer. You can use free, third-party utilities to extract the contacts preserved on the back-up copy -- even if you do not have access to a working iPhone.

Things You'll Need

• Computer running Windows, with Windows Grep (see Resources) installed
• Computer running Mac OS X, with sqlite3 (see Resources) installed

Instructions

1. Log in to the Windows computer. Click on "Start," then click on "Run." Enter "cmd" in the "Run" window, then press "Enter."

2. Click on the Command window you just created. Enter these commands:

   C:

   cd "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup"

   grep 'AddressBook' *.mdbackup

   The last command will list the files containing the string "AddressBook." Write down the names of those files. Those are the files that contain the information for iPhone contacts.

3. Copy all of those files to the Mac OS X computer. There are many ways of copying the files; a simple one is to email them to your own webmail account as attachments.

4. Log in to the Mac OS X computer. Launch a Web browser. Go to the "Google Code: iPhone-backup-decoder" Web page. Download the script "decode_iphone_backup_v2.1.py" onto the Mac.

5. Open a terminal window on the Mac. Go to the directory where the files that you copied over from the Windows computer are. Open each one of those files with a text editor until you see a file that contains the string "AddressBook.sqlite" in its first line.

6. Invoke the decoding script on the file identified in Step 5 by typing this command:

   ./decode_iphone_backup_v2.1.py md8277y34.mdbackup

   Replace "md8277y34.mdbackup" by the name of the file you identified in Step 5. The decoding script will generate a new file named "AddressBook.sqlite."

7. Execute in the terminal window:

   sqlite3 AddressBook.sqlite

   Type the following three commands:

   .output myContacts.txt

   select ABPerson.first,ABPerson.last,ABMultiValue.value from ABPerson,ABMultiValue where ABMultiValue.record_id=ABPerson.ROWID

   .quit

   File "myContacts.txt" (created by Sqlite) contains all of the contacts in the iPhone backup, in readable form.